Articles by Robert Nyman [Editor emeritus]

The JS world moves quickly, and nowadays, there’re some new kids around the block. Today, we’ll explore Browserify, Gulp, and React and see whether they’d sound suitable for our projects. You might have heard of them but not have had the time to check them out. So we’ll look at the advantages and disadvantages of […]

It’s no secret that the best frameworks and tools are extracted, not created out of thin air. Since launching Firefox OS, Mozilla has been approached by countless app developers and web developers with a simple question: “How do I make apps for Firefox OS?” The answer: “It’s the web; use existing web technologies.” was—and still […]

A programming game is a computer game where two or more programs compete with each other. What are the basic requirements for programming games and can they be realized in browsers? With JavaScript? 4 basic claims There are 4 basic claims. Competing programs: must run isolated from the main program. must communicate with the main […]

This is part 2 of a new Interview series here at Mozilla Hacks. “How can we, as developers, write more superb software?” A simple question without a simple answer. Writing good code is hard, even for developers with years of experience. Luckily, the Mozilla community is made up of some of the best development, QA […]

As soon as the Boot to Gecko (B2G) project was announced in July 2011 I knew it something I wanted to contribute to. I’d already been working on the idea of a browser based OS for a while but it seemed Mozilla had the people, the technology and the influence to build something truly disruptive. […]

The mozjpeg project recently released version 2.1. It aims to improve the efficiency of JPEG encoding over existing encoders while maintaining compatibility with the vast majority of existing decoders. I’d like to explain how you can use this software to reduce the size of your JPEGs. Specifically, I’m going to go over usage of mozjpeg’s […]

Whether you are a business or community page owner, what would be better than increasing your page reachability by offering your standalone mobile app? Apptuter is an open source framework to help you achieve that, with minimum coding knowledge and easy to follow steps you would be able to produce your own app. The framework […]

Let’s start with a story. A user story: A friend of mine called me in the middle of the day with a very strange request. He told me “Could you come over and help me to fill-in a form”. I was surprised as filling forms is the easiest thing to do online, isn’t it? Even […]

When you start developing for Firefox OS you might be underwhelmed by the tools that are provided. There is no standard UI toolkit, or a JavaScript framework that all apps build on. This is not a situation that’s inherently bad because in essence Firefox OS is the web; and thus gives you complete freedom in […]

A new set of Firefox Developer Tools features has just been uplifted to the Aurora channel. These features are available right now in Aurora, and will be in the Firefox 33 release in October. This release brings many new additions, especially to the Inspector tool: Event listeners popup Any node with a JavaScript event listener […]